Author guidelines

Author guidelines

All article submissions must be house styled in accordance with the Journal’s style guide, and must not be under consideration at any other journal. If any part of the paper has been published elsewhere, contributors are responsible for securing the necessary permissions required. All submissions are screened by the editorial panel, and if accepted for further consideration, are subject to a blind peer review process managed by an associate editor. All contributors must be prepared to wait for between 12 and 16 weeks for a final decision on their submission if it is peer reviewed. Please note that, if you are offered an opportunity to revise your paper post-review, guidelines on how to prepare the revised manuscript are available here.

Article submissions must be original research, and must be between 6000 and 8000 words excluding references and endnotes. This document will guide authors on pre-submission self-assessment of their papers.

*Please note that the journal does not currently charge authors page fees.

Book reviews must be between 800 and 1000 words, and can include references to additional texts, although these should be kept to a minimum. Book reviews must be critical in nature - by this we mean that they need to summarise, locate and critique the argument of the book in reference to the broader field in which the book is located. We do not publish book reviews that simply offer a precis of the book. Reviewers need to consider the contribution the author makes to current and/or historical research within the relevant field; the accessibility of the book for readers of this journal; and the way in which the book makes and supports its contribution to scholarship.

Review essays should be 2000 - 3000 words in length, and should make use of at least three connected books to make an original argument that extends on our book review criteria. Please look carefully at the aims and scope of the journal before considering or proposing a review essay.

If you are interested in writing a book review or review essay for the journal, please contact the Managing Editor, Dr Sherran Clarence (cristaljournal@gmail.com).

STYLE GUIDE FOR AUTHORS

The CriSTaL style guide is based on the Harvard Style, with some deviations for house preferences. The journal uses U.K. punctuation and spelling, following The Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Foreign words (except proper names) should be italicised.

ARTICLE TITLE AND HEADINGS

Use capitalisation in the article title and headings for nouns, pronouns, verbs and adjectives.

Headings and subheadings should not be numbered.

Indicate main headings by bold lettering and subheadings by bold italic. Third level headings should be in plain text and underlined.

Acronyms must be spelt out on first appearance. Provide parenthetical explanations: CHE (Council on Higher Education).

Do not use a full stop (period) after abbreviations including the first and last letter of the word (contractions): Mr Mrs Dr St Ltd

Some abbreviations drop the full stop, including those in the international system of measurement: Mme Mlle m mm kg

A full stop for: vol. seq. no. ibid. et al.

Use full stops in the abbreviation of names of countries (except the USSR) but omit them with acronyms: U.S. U.K. UN EU NATO

PUNCTUATION

All punctuation should be followed by a single space and not a double space.

There should be no full stop at the end of headings or subheadings.

There is no need for double punctuation at the end of a sentence, either after an abbreviation or after a punctuation mark in quotation marks or a book or article title.

[BRACKETS] AND (PARENTHESES)

Use square brackets for editorial comments within quotations or for uncertain data in references (e.g., if the publication year or city is ascertainable but does not appear in the book).

Brackets are also used within parentheses: (he used to go there [to Tehran] every spring).

Include translations of foreign-language quotations in brackets immediately following the quotation (without italics and without quotation marks): ‘Todas somos amigas de desde chiquitas, casi puras vecinas’ [We are all friends since we were small, and almost all are neighbours].

QUOTATION MARKS

Always use single quotation marks. Double quotation marks are only used within a quotation. He remarked: ‘This charge of “fraudulent conversion” will never stick.’

Quotations of eight to ten lines or longer (or over 60 words) should be indented as extracts and separated from the main text. Such text extracts should not be set within quotation marks.

Extracts longer than 400 words require copyright permission.

DASHES

The UK style for dashes requires blanks before and after the en dash.

ELLIPSES POINTS (…) (. …) (, …) (… !)

Three points should be used for omitted text. There should be one space before and after the ellipsis.

If the omitted text follows a completed sentence, there should be four dots, the first indicating a full stop (or period). In contradiction to the three-dot ellipses, there is no space between the last word in the sentence and the first full stop ending the sentence.

DATES, NUMBERS AND RANGES

Dates should be set day/month/year, with no comma in between the elements, e.g., 26 January 1988.

In general, use words for numbers that are less than 100, and numerals for all other numbers. Number ranges should not be abbreviated.

In-text number ranges should employ prepositions not dashes:

Use ‘from 1924 to 1928’ or ‘between 1924 and 1928’

Do not use ‘from 1924–1928’, and not ‘between 1924–1928’

REFERENCES

AUTHOR-DATE SYSTEM

In-text citations should follow the author-date system with full documentation in the Reference section.

Every author mentioned in the reference list must be cited in the main text, and every author cited in the main text must be listed in the reference list.

Confirm that spelling and dates are consistent between the main text and the reference list.

Any parenthetical notes or footnotes should be kept short and to a minimum.

Acknowledgements should not be included as a numbered note but given its own heading and paragraph following the body of the text, prior to the note and reference sections

IN-TEXT, AUTHOR-DATE CITATION EXAMPLES

(Pickett and White, 1985; Smith, 1987) [Note: alphabetical order]

Jones’s research (1977, 1979a, 1979b) indicates that …

(Kant, n.d.; McGinnis, forthcoming)

(James, 2018: 3)

Single Author with Multiple Sources: (Smith, 1993: 63; 1998: 124–169)

Three or More Authors: (Jones, et al. 2001)

Authors with Same Last Name: (D. Smith ,1981; G. Smith, 1999)

REFERENCE LIST

The reference list must be in alphabetical order. For multiple listings under an author’s name, list the oldest publication first, followed by the other publications, in chronological order.

Repeat author’s name rather than use underscores or dashes to indicate a subsequent title by the same author.

Confirm that web links are accessible as cited.

REFERENCE EXAMPLES

BOOK: Knight, P. T. 2002. Being a Teacher in Higher Education. Buckingham: SRHE and Open University Press.

ARTICLE IN A JOURNAL WITH DOI NUMBER: Clarence, S. 2011. Making inter-disciplinary spaces for talk about and change in student writing and literacy development. Teaching in Higher Education, DOI:10.1080/13562517.2011.611876.